Regional development in a resource production system: long distance commuting, population growth, and wealth redistribution in the Western Australia Goldfields

Abstract

Resource towns often exist on a knife‐edge, largely depending upon global demand for their resource/s and, at the same time, playing a critical role in the development of a nation. The transition from single resource towns to diversified economies has been modelled on several occasions, but their application to other resource locales is difficult given the unique interplay of geographic, political, social, and economic factors. Nonetheless, Innis' Canadian staples theory may explain the political motivations of resource extraction and exportation, not least in relation to the Western Australia Goldfields. This paper seeks to explore the theory's potential in this context by examining the implications of high labour mobility. It employs a two‐step process using, first, a social network analysis to map the entire Australian labour commuting network and, second, a regression analysis of commuting, regional wealth, and population size against population change. While the Goldfields historically grew in line with processes described by Innis' theory, contemporary high labour mobility has created a variegated landscape of different development dynamics and trajectories. This finding carries implications for network patterns of residence and work. Labour acts to extend the distribution of wealth by sending incomes to the metropolitan core and to amenity‐rich regional towns across the State and nation. In such light, regional development scholars must view the resource town in its broader urban system of distinct but interlocked, and sometimes overlapping, activity nodes.

Inequality and regional development in resource economies of advanced capitalist economies

“…With a dearth of alternative theories of resource economies, ST continues to be drawn on to explain contemporary geographies (cf. Argent, ; Carson, ; Tonts et al, ) despite the very different dynamics and processes occurring now compared to when it was conceived (Martinus, ).…”

“…The diversification process of Staples Theory presumes labor is relatively more sticky to geographic place than capital (Martinus, ). The growth of a resource town is assumed to occur through labor migration, as the emotional place attachment of even short‐term indentured commuters leads to settling down and family migration.…”

“…And Tonts et al () that the propensity to make national decisions from urban areas, coupled with the large capital investments of resource extraction, meant peripheries were treated as a resource bank. Martinus () found the extreme uncoupling of labor's need to migrate to resource towns for work, intensified core‐periphery socioeconomic inequality of resource economies in advanced capitalist nations beyond what is recognized in current theories.…”

“…By in large, theories of regional development only partly explain the spatial peculiarities of inequality and (dis)advantage in resource economies through convergence and divergence processes of core‐periphery resource exploitation and wealth accumulation. Much of these understandings have emerged from binary notions of how resource redistribution occurs between the Global North and Global South, with limited research unpacking different industry relations and processes driving regional development in developing nations of the Global South (e.g., Horner & Murphy, ) and advanced capitalist nations of the Global North (e.g., James, ; Martinus, ). Indeed, as noted by Horner, Schindler, Haberly, and Aoyama () and Rodríguez‐Pose (), there has been a reversal in how globalization processes are interpreted in advanced capitalist and developing nations, with a “backlash” in the former from the political right as uneven development deepens within its nations.…”

“…Argent () observed this paradoxical existence—being highly globally integrated to international markets and multinational corporations, but yet extremely remote—meant they could simultaneously be in economic boom and adverse poverty. These factors lay the foundation for large spatial inequality and disadvantage in the distribution of employment, population, and infrastructure between the cities where exploitative governments and corporates are located and the periphery resource towns (Eikeland, ; Martinus, ; Tonts et al, ). As such, periphery resource communities are periphery in every sense—geographic, economic, social, and political.…”